BoJack Horseman has a pretty amazing collection of real-world art (and real-world art jokes)

Fans of BoJack Horseman already know that the series frequently reaches early-Simpsons levels of saturation and quality with its background gags, whether they come in the form of business signs, news chyrons, or an ever-reliable banner gag. But—befitting the rich tastes of many of the Hollywoo elite the show focuses on—BoJack’s background jokes can also get surprisingly highbrow, as revealed in this remarkably thorough cataloging of all the fine-art references in the show’s first four seasons.

Put together by Daily Art Magazine, the list nods to nearly 30 artists whose works have shown up, in some form or other, on the walls of BoJack and his friends. [Note: Some of the entries that appear in the piece appear to have been copied from an article posted a few months ago by writer Lacy Lew Nguyen Wright.]

Some are fairly obvious, like the Andy Warhol-inspired horseshoes in Mr. Horseman’s bedroom, or Botticelli’s The Birth Of Venus on the walls of his restaurant, Elefante. The real beauty is in the ways the show’s art team find comic twists on classics, though, by putting one of Georgia O’Keefe’s famously yonic flowers up on the walls of an OBGYN’s office, or taking the cat from Manet’s Olympia and making her an anthropomorphic animal person in line with the rest of the show’s cast. (Our personal favorite: Transforming one of Heather Jansch’s bronze driftwood horse sculptures into BoJack Horseman’s two-legged style.) It’s an amazing amount of work and research for jokes that will probably pass half the show’s audience by, and a reminder of the dedication the Netflix series packs into even the silliest or dumbest of smart-people jokes.

Update: This article has been updated to note the apparent copying of Wright’s original piece.

 
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